Why Microsoft’s Nadella Is Wrong About Women and Raises

Microsoft’s chief executive advised women not to ask for raises. Social scientists who have studied the issue would beg to differ.

“It’s not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing on Thursday. (Grace Hopper was a pioneering computer scientist and Navy admiral.) “That’s good karma. It will come back. That’s the kind of person that I want to trust, that I want to give more responsibility to.”

If it struck you, as it did many, that it goes against much of the advice that women have been hearing, there’s a reason: It’s not true, according to many studies of women, pay and negotiation.

Women are paid less than men, and one reason is that women are less likely to negotiate for raises or promotions. They feel more anxiety about negotiating and are less likely to consider job situations to be negotiable, according to Linda Babcock, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a leading researcher on women and pay negotiations.

In a study of Carnegie Mellon business school graduates, she found that the starting salaries of men were an average of 7.6 percent higher than those of women. And here is one reason, according to Ms. Babcock: Fifty-seven percent of men negotiated their pay, but only 7 percent of women did, despite the fact that they were coached at business school to negotiate compensation. Those who did negotiate increased their starting salaries an average of 7.4 percent. Men had starting offers that were an average of $4,000 higher than for women, and people who negotiated received $4,053 more.

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Microsoft's chief executive, Satya Nadella, at a forum in Beijing last month. He has backtracked from comments he made Thursday that women should avoid asking for a raise.CreditChina Daily/Reuters

Women’s behavior is just half the equation. The other half is how they are treated when they ask. One of the reasons that Mr. Nadella’s comments provoked such a response at the conference and on social media is that he also seemed to confirm a common fear: that women who negotiate their compensation will pay a price.

Ms. Babcock, along with Hannah Riley Bowles, a senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard, and Lei Lai, an assistant professor of management at Tulane, studied how women are treated when they negotiate for higher pay.

They found that people penalized female job applicants more severely than men for negotiating. Men penalized women more than men for asking, while women penalized both men and women. They attributed it in part to stereotypes about appropriate masculine and feminine behavior.

“If women are perceived to be ‘clamoring’ for the same resources as men, they may lose the grace of their idealized feminine niceness and be rejected for demanding what is not due to them,” they wrote.

Mr. Nadella backpedaled in a memo to Microsoft employees late Thursday. “I answered that question completely wrong,” he said. “If you think you deserve a raise, you should just ask.”

Many people responding to Mr. Nadella’s comments asked whether he got to the chief executive position by asking for it or by quietly waiting to be noticed. Microsoft declined to comment on that question.